Your Hosts and Facilitators

Steven Martyn

I've lived intimately with the land for 27 years, growing and foraging most of my food and medicine. As a child my Grandmother taught me about spirit medicine and my Grandfather taught me about the living ecology and horticulture. By the time I was eight I could identify any tree in the bush around our cottage, any time of year, just by its bark. I also knew how to read cards and tea leaves, and had active relationships with spirit guides and nature divas at this age. I was lost and bored in the Toronto suburbs in my teens, but after about four years of wondering it all crashed down when I was 19. I found Buddhism and I moved to the bush. I lived like a monk for four years and learned how to communicate with my companions the plants, animals and spirits of the land. Since that time I've started busnesses working with the ecology ( Livingstone and Greenbloom - an ecological landscaping company in Toronto), taught workshops and courses for 21 years in Canada, the US, and Central America on "wilderness living", "primitive living skills", "wild edibles", "intuitive healing", "folk medicine", "intergrated organic agriculture", "forest gardening", "sustainable building" and "nature immersion". I did my journeyman for becoming a builder in 1984, and was a professional artist showing in TO from 1989-94 . I have an MA from Trent in Canadian and Native land use and a hounours BFA from York in Visual art. I am a visionary earth worker and healer, and have spent most of my adult life learing from, and about the Earth. She is who I live for, and above all who I am loyal too, she is my mother and I willingly give her my life over and over.

   I now live on the Golden Lake farm outside Algonquin Park with Megan and Oscar our son. We subsist from the perenial abundance of the areas wild ecology, through our gardens and The Algonquin Tea Company which I co-founded in 1996.

Megan Spencer

Megan has been living on the land here at the Algonquin Tea Farm for just over 4 years . Always passionate about offering space for people to just be, and to foster the knowing that we are all of value, she has a background in working as an intake worker with homeless people at a health centre in downtown Toronto, volunteer co-ordinator at a highly diverse community centre, co-ordinator of the AIDS vigil and relief work at the largest day drop in for homeless people in Toronto. Megan has also held several different volunteer positions such as taking part in anti-homophobia workshops for group homes and classrooms, lesbiangaybi phone line support, and community gardens.

Throughout this work, Megan became aware of the deep need for more integrated healing, the need for the basic human right of access to real food and the option of free alternative therapies for treatment.  She began studying herbal medicine through the dominion herbal school while still working as an intake worker, as well as  applying her artistic interest and background into her relationships with clients, with simple offerings, such as that of being able to sit for awhile and draw pictures together. The blessing of offering an opening for different perspective of their own value gave Megan an intense sense of purpose.

Burnout happens though, and this drove Megan to finding a way to learn more directly from the plants she was studying, leading her to the Algonquin Tea Company Farm, where she met her partner, Steven.

Always an independent spirit, curious about how to do things from scratch, and having already realized the huge vulnerability of not knowing how to grow food during her time with the University of Toronto community garden, she began her learning with Steven on the farm of growing and preserving food. Megan is passionate about the need for food and animals raised with respect, finding the beauty and lessons that arise from those relationships intensely beautiful and fulfilling. The need to share this knowledge is offered in a series of workshops held at the farm through the Earth Wisdom Centre, which she and Steven co-created in 2005. Through this venue megan continues to offer space for people to just be who they are .

Now a at-home mother of 16 month old Oscar, the lessons continue, with the humbling experience of  becoming a mother, and all the shifts in self, perspective and priority.  Megan also volunteers her time at the local library doing puppet shows for kids groups, and is on a committee of local mums creating an alternative school.